SENATE BILL: Federal Electoral Act of 2019 (At Final Vote)

[Sestak]

The primary thing that's been done here is that as many vague statements as possible have been clarified. This includes (but is by no means limited to):

- Explaining how STV and House elections are actually supposed to work. Which was completely missing up until this point.
- Properly setting scheduling for House specials, also missing up until this point.
- Clarifying and streamlining runoff procedure, avoiding the creation of situations where there's a runoff between two candidates outside of the final round that could end up handing victory to a candidate not involved in the runoff (and fully eliminates the possibilities of a runoff during STV).
- Defining clearly what exactly constitutes a valid candidacy declaration.
- Setting regulations on ballot design to ensure each candidate is fairly represented. Also allows independent and unaffliated candidates to choose to appear with both "Independent"/"Unaffiliated" - and requires a link on the ballot to the most recent version of this Act. See §5.3 for more details.
(side note there should be a "d." before "during presidential elections" in that section - PPT fix if possible would be good there)
- §8 sets clearer guidelines and fallbacks regarding election certification
- §10 is mostly a doomsday scenario case which would allow the board mods to restart Atlasia if it ever came to a point where the officeholders needed for it to function went absent or vacant, while still acting within the legal framework of the game (thus preventing inevitable annoying litigiation if such a thing did ever somehow come to pass)
- The whole thing has been reordered so that it goes in order from the start of the process (determining the date of the election and having candidates declare) to the end of it (determining the winner, certifications, and potential runoff). Exception is the absentee ballot section, which was added later (iirc at Poirot's suggestion) - I'd support amending this so it would be reordered just before or after the current §5.

Then there's what I think is the most important provision here. §1.3 clearly sets that for record-keeping purposes, all future electoral statute should be considered as amending this act. That means that ideally, we will be able to keep one up-to-date "Federal Electoral Act of 2019" statute page that incorporates all changes that may be made in the future and thus serves as a complete record of Atlasian federal elections law. (Wiki pages could also be kept for the original and any intermediate versions as well but the idea is that there would always be a current, easily accessible one.) Ideally, this would push all future election law changes and additions to be structured explicitly as modifying this bill, but even if they weren't they would just be documented as "Section [13 or higher] - previous sections of the bill notwithstanding". Which, again, would make potential confusion much more clear early on and create more of an incentive to write electoral law changes as amendments to the statute.

Last note, this is almost all completely new text done from scratch, as I didn't find much of the old text to be even salvageable. So I encourage you all to to pore over this to make sure there aren't any loopholes or potential issues or ambiguity here. The goal is to provide a solid, unambiguous core for the game to operate off of.

[Sestak]

When we were discussing this bill, I recall particularly regarding deregistration for instance that it would be handled in a separate bill later on. Is that still the plan?

There is a pretty much final draft of the Census Act sitting around somewhere on Google Docs, I think - I just want to look over it one more time for typos/issues before it’s introduced (and I’m not going to be on my laptop for a couple days)

[Sestak]

Census Act has been introduced in the intro thread fwiw, if you guys were waiting for that.